The Library was the first institution to partner with the Flickr Commons project – a collective of 23 national and international collecting institutions with big reputations and bigger community spirit. They have uploaded to the Flickr Commons site images designated as having “No Known Copyright Restrictions“.

And while the FSA/OWI archive has shaped the national consciousness and the self-assembled histories of Americans of every class, we here at Raw File think the FSA/OWI archive and the venerable Library of Congress are hogging the limelight. There are many other gripping, gateway photo sets into the Flickr Commons project. Some even preempt styles or subject matter later adopted by advertisements and famous photographers.

This gallery will get you started on exploring some of the most interesting and underrepresented collections.

Muray, the renowned portrait photographer, set the conventions for the advertising industry with luscious Kodachrome photography. His commercial work featured chuckling postmen, apple-cheeked Santas and girls with pigtails and chicks-in-a-basket. He worked for Dodge, Lucky Strike, A&P Coffee, publications like McCall’s Homemaker and Style & Beauty, as well as various insurance companies. Muray’s subjects epitomized prosperous postwar America as much as Rosie the Riveter defined the World War II years.

The Belize Larval Fish Group is the product of multiple Belize expeditions by the Smithsonian and affiliates. Looking like the raw data for a United Colors of Benetton ad campaign, these images could be blown up four feet wide and hung in any Chelsea gallery.

If the conceptual artists Hans Haacke and Mark Dion fail to hook you with object histories or taxonomies, maybe these will.

This set as much as any other set on the commons proves Flickr’s serious role in the democratization of art’s historical canon.

Hill and Adamson were pioneers in early European photography, intensely driving innovation in Britain. Their 3,000 calotypes from the mid 19th century featured Edinburgh, the fishing villages of Fife, civic construction, artists, clergy and ordinary folk — the great and the good of Scottish society. These stills required sunlight and long exposures so even the interior shots were taken outdoors with props.

Paysages et Sites Pyrenees is an unconventional collection with as many extremely evocative images as complete duds.

The photographs are the work of Eugene Trutat, who seems to have had a blast bounding up glaciers and hiking through alpine villages on some kind of dharma bum geological expedition. If Clyfford Still had applied his cavernous aesthetic to the wet plate collodion process, something similar to Trutat’s close-up studies of geological forms would have resulted.

Trutat’s work can be framed within the continuing tradition of mountain-conquering photographers — from pioneers such as Carleton Watkins and C.L. Weed to contemporary practitioners like Andrew Querner.

This timely set offers a glimpse back to when the American car industry wasn’t a generation or two behind Asia’s.

Included are great commercial shots, bus design plans, brochure pictures and “action shots” but our favorites are these two gems showing the same group of women occupying different decks of the same bus. Are these ladies privileged guests or workers used as props during their lunch hour? Tip: Track the hairstyles.

Photographs of animals are a curious wonder. Elliott Erwitt proved that humor and clever staging could enamor the audience and satisfy that persistent human whim to see themselves in animals.

But we do not see here the pampered pets of Central Park South or Fifth Avenue. If human emotions are to be imposed upon these caged animals then solemnity and an awareness of separation from habitat prevail. These photographs are heavy with a sense of loss.

Alan Villier’s On the High Seas, invites comparison with Jean Gaumy’s Men At Sea, although Gaumy’s are a more recent and more elemental. Villiers certainly took more dynamic photos than the ones in this set, but this is a good introduction to his oeuvre nonetheless.

For his latest project, Don McCullin photographed archaeological ruins around the Mediterranean. Later, McCullin made a personal selection of photographs from the National Media Museum’s collection, in order to reveal how these sites were recorded by earlier photographers such as Francis Frith and Maxime Du Camp.

These photos are intriguing not just because of their content, but also because they’re handpicked by a revered photojournalist. How often are you privy to the curatorial impulses of a photographic legend?

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